Re: Passive and active....

At 14:54 +0200 27.12.1999, Markus Miekk-oja wrote:
>
>An example would be my native (Swedish) dialect, where the passive -s
>often is used as an aspect or mood("habitual" I think it's called).
Which of course is because it was originally not a passive, but a medial
voice, i.e. it indicated that the subject acted upon itself, or that two
subjects acted reciprocally on each other -- hence such idioms as "slåss"
'fight' from "slå" 'beat'.  Indeed the passive-marker -s is a worn-down
remainder of the reflexive pronoun "sig" -- in which those who know German
or Yiddish will recognise "sich" or "zikh", which was once cliticized to
the verb.  In Old Icelandic this is still visible: compare a form like
"kallask" 'call oneself (something)' to the active voice "kalla" and the
reflexive pronoun "sik".  Runic Swedish and Danish instead used forms like
"kallasR", with the accusative form of the reflexive pronoun -- "se'r" in
non-clitic form.

Since the first and second person used the accusative and dative of the
personal pronoun instead of the special reflexive Old Icelandic had a quite
complicated medial paradigm:

    ek kallamk (< kalla mik) 'I call myself'
    thu' kallart (< kallaR thik) 'thou callest thyself'
    hann kallask (< kallaR sik) 'he calls himself'
    vit ko`llumk (< ko`llum okkr) 'we two call ourselves'
    ve'r ko`llums (< ko`llum oss) 'we call ourselves'
    (no attested contractions for second person dual and plural, but the
     spellings "kallath thit" and "kallath ykkr" were certainly contracted
     in pronunciation, since many verses require that in order to scan! :-)
    their kallask (< kalla sik) 'they call themselves'

Except in the most early manuscripts all are spelled "-z" or "-st", except
the first person of all numbers, which was "-umk" at least into the 14th
century.



/BP

 B.Philip Jonsson  <bpj@...> <melroch@...>
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